Bucket heaters are designed to keep whatever is in the bucket at the correct temperature. If you are in an industry and need to keep items such as food or various liquids in large buckets, it is likely that they will need to be kept at the correct temperature to be in their optimum condition.
This is exactly what bucket heaters have been designed to do. However, before we go into depth in looking at bucket heaters from Powerblanket, it’s important that you understand alternative heating options too. This will help you to see why bucket heaters such as these are far superior in both performance and usability.
What Are The Alternatives To Bucket Heaters – Band Heaters
Bucket heaters are a relatively new phenomenon. For many years, heating devices called band heaters have been used in order to keep products in buckets and drums warm/at the correct temperature.
What is a band heater? A band heater is a circular-shaped heating element that can be clamped around anything that is circular to provide it with heat. The element within the band heater heats up, and thus passes the heat to whatever it is clamped to through conductivity. Whilst they work, band heaters are not anywhere near as advanced as bucket heaters.
Band heaters often suffer from loss of heat and poor energy efficiency. This is due to the fact that they are simply bits of metal that heat up. Whilst they are great at transferring heat to an object through conductivity, they are also just as good as losing a lot of their heat through the other side. In order to combat this, band heaters are often fitted with insulation of some sort in order to make an effort to keep the majority of the heat being produced inside. The effectiveness of this insulation depends upon what the insulation is made of.
How Did Bucket Heaters Come About?
As we have already said, band heaters have been in use for quite a long time now. However, they are particularly inefficient and have a number of downsides to using them. Some of the major downsides of traditional band heaters include:
Poor Temperature Control – band heaters are well known for getting extremely hot and causing damage to the product that they are meant to be just keeping warm.
Poor Reliability – in addition to becoming very hot, band heaters are not the most reliable devices either. They are known for failing in the middle of use and resultantly causing products to be spoiled.
Bad Thermostats – thermostats on band heaters are not as accurate as they should be. This means that you often can’t tell when the temperature is dropping. As a result of this, products can become damaged and unable to be used.
Not Long Lasting – finally, band heaters are known for their short life expectancies. Since band heaters are not particularly durable, the life expectancy is particularly short. Not only does this mean that you will be burdened with the hassle of constantly replacing them, but you will also have to pay the cost of a new band heater as well as the man hours required to replace it every single time that one has to be replaced.
What Are The Alternatives?
Bucket heaters. Bucket heaters have taken everything that band heaters did poorly or did not perform well in and completely turned them around.
The design of bucket heaters is completely different to that of band heaters. For a start, band heaters were simply “bands” that wrapped around a bucket, pail or drum, and provided heat to only that area. Heating the rest of the drum was reliant upon the conductivity of the drum being able to draw the heat from the one area that was being heated by the band. This was not exactly a good solution to heating and meant that there were often a lot of variances in temperature throughout the product that was meant to be all at the same temperature.
Bucket heaters on the other hand, adopt a far more sense-making method of heat spreading. In fact, they do not rely on the spreading of heat whatsoever. Bucket heaters use a blanket technology to ensure that every single area of the bucket or drum is being heated to exactly the same temperature. In addition to being able to provide the same heat to all areas of the drum, a blanket heater provides a form of insulation to the drum that was never provided with ban heaters. The blanket heater that is used is made of a highly durable and highly insulating material – it is therefore great for keeping in heat and retaining the correct temperature once it has been reached, regardless of the conditions outside.
The Powerblanket Bucket Heater – What Are Its Advantages
Keep Your Products And Materials Safe – whilst out in the elements, products that are being stored in a bucket, pail, or drum can become very susceptible to freezing and damage as a result of the surrounding elements. This is particularly true when the elements are at their worst. If you were to store your products and materials inside the bucket that were not insulated, there’s a high chance that they would become damaged as a result of freezing. Even if the bucket were to be insulated, there is still a fairly high chance of this happening since there is no additional heat being supplied to retain the correct temperature.
The Powerblanket bucket heater allows the drum to be heated and insulated at the same time. Unlike band heaters, it provides even heat distribution that means that you can make sure that the correct temperature is maintained for all of the materials within the bucket. The Powerblanket also does not have an extremely high outside temperature, meaning that you won’t be burned should your skin come into contact with it – a major advantage over band heaters indeed.
In addition to this heating advantage, the Powerblanket heater means that your product will be kept in optimum condition at all times. It is also extremely easy to start using right away since it’s simple wraps around a drum or a bucket. It’s impossible to fault the Powerblanket!